United by Faith: The Multiracial Congregation As an Answer to the Problem of Race ISBN: 9780199849659 Platform/Publisher: Oxford Academic / Oxford University Press Digital rights:Users: Unlimited; Printing: Unlimited; Download: Unlimited Subjects: Religion;
As America grows ever more ethnically diverse, Christian churches remain racially homogeneous. This state of affairs must end, argues this earnest blend of religious moralizing and social science; indeed, church integration is so central both to the Christian mission and to racial equality at large that "the twenty-first century must be the century of multi-racial congregations." The authors, professors either of sociology or "reconciliation studies," base their claims on theology, church history and sociology. They look back to the diversity and cosmopolitanism of the early Church as a model for contemporary Christians, and trace the legacy of racism and segregation in American churches and attempts to overcome them. Drawing on questionnaires, interviews with church members and leaders, and on-site studies of four racially mixed congregations, they probe both the promise and pitfalls of church integration. The authors respond to minority critics who value uniracial churches as hothouses for distinctive worship styles, rallying points for activism and refuges from white social hegemony, and stress that integrated churches can and should guard against assimilationist pressures, preserve the unique cultures of all racial groups and cultivate a racially diverse church leadership. They never quite demonstrate the world-historical centrality of racially mixed congregations, and they concede the aura of awkward dutifulness that accompanies self-conscious attempts at church integration, observing that congregations are not truly integrated until all the racial groups feel somewhat uncomfortable in the resulting milieu. Still, the authors make a good case that this is a cross that Christian churches should take up. (June) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Curtiss Paul DeYoung is an Associate Professor of Reconciliation Studies at Bethel College, St. Paul, MN, and an ordained minister in the Church of God (Anderson, IN). Michael O. Emerson is Professor of Sociology at the University of Notre Dame, and is the co-author of Divided by Faith: Evangelical Religion and the Problem of Race in America. George Yancey is an Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of North Texas. Karen Chai Kim is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of Houston.
